Brian Wilson: Smile

The piano in the sand pit, the orchestra decked out in fireman's helmets, the kilos of grade A hashish, the master tapes that were destroyed, or locked in a vault, the breakdown and the years of silence and self-enforced seclusion. Was there ever an album so surrounded by myth, so weighed down by anecdote and legend, so inflated by its own absence, as Smile?

As it briefly existed in its original form, scored, directed and produced by Brian Wilson, with typically baroque lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, and sublimely interwoven harmonies by the Beach Boys, Smile was rock's great lost artefact, as revered as the Grail itself, and only marginally less elusive. It has lived in our collective wishful thinking for 37 years, has tantalisingly come to life in fragments from official releases, bootlegs, and latterly, on stage, as part of the ongoing and unlikely resurrection of Brian Wilson, pop's greatest compositional genius.

From the evidence of the elegiac 'Surf's Up', which appeared on the 1971 Beach Boys' album of the same name, or the wondrous 'Cabin Essence' from 20/20, it seemed that Wilson was not exaggerating when, back in 1966, in the wake of Pet Sounds he announced: 'I'm writing a teenage symphony to God'.

Here, then, is a faithfully remade version of that celestial undertaking, minus the Beach Boys, of course, and no longer clothed in the warm glow of analogue recording technology, but mind-blowing all the same. From the opening a capella harmonies of 'Our Prayer/Gee' to the closing chords of 'Good Vibrations', it unfolds in its original, and never before complete, sequence as a thing of rare beauty and cumulative power.

Like 'Surf's Up', the song that ends the album's second movement, the seldom heard 'Roll Plymouth Rock' is another of Parks's elliptical lyrics, though more instantly recognisable as a signature Beach Boys song than almost anything else here. 'Mrs O'Leary's Cow', originally titled 'Mrs O'Leary's Fire', may well be the 'scary orchestra piece' that Wilson alluded to, still looking disturbed by the memory, when I interviewed him a few years back. It is uneasy listening in every sense, and the only segment that suggests the fragility of his mind back then, and the abyss he fell into thereafter.

The rest is as wondrous and as complex as the claims made on its behalf for all those years, though strangely disconcerting in a kind of Brian Wilson heritage industry way. (Imagine, by way of comparison, McCartney re-recording 'Sgt. Pepper' with George Martin and the best Beatles' tribute band in the world.)

For all that, it raises one of pop's great unanswerable questions: had Brian kept it together back then, where would he have gone from here? God only knows.